The objectives of the Recruitment and Clinical Assessment Core are to meet recruitment and retention targets for Projects 1-4, and pilot projects, and to ensure accurate data collection in order to facilitate data management and analysis for the Projects collectively and individually. This Core will centralize the flow of data from recruitment of subjects to the acquisition of qualitative and quantitative clinical data. Given the widely reported difficulty in recruiting African-Americans into research studies, the recruitment function of this Core is critical to the success of the Projects. We will maximize the recruitment and retention of research participants using culturally sensitive and novel approaches (e.g. recruitment videos), and highly-trained recruiters. We will draw on the collective experience of the Core's directors, the Projects' investigators, and their professional and community ties, in our effort to optimize recruitment for the Projects. For example, our institution has a database (established through a grant from NIA, with the Core's co-Director Dr. Lichtenberg as P.I.) of nearly 2500 older African-Americans who have already expressed an interest in participating in research. The recruiters will also administer questionnaires during study visits, helping to establish a rapport with the participants from initiation through follow-up in order to enhance retention. They will work closely with the Psychosocial and Community Measures Core. Incentives, study souvenirs, parking vouchers, birthday cards, and newsletters will also be utilized for tracking and retaining participants. This Core will provide a uniform system of clinical data acquisition in order to ensure a consistently high quality of data for the Center's database and ultimately for statistical analysis. Scannable data collection forms will be used whenever possible to reduce data entry errors. This Core's clinical assessment activities will involve specimen collection, arrangements for laboratory analyses, and acquisition of questionnaire, clinical, anthropometric, and body composition data. The work of this Core will be performed mainly at the Clinical Research Center (CRC) in the Department of Internal Medicine, and at the nearby CRC research laboratory site, and will support all Projects and pilot studies.